Ode to ‘A hard man fe dead!’

My meetings with Dr Roger Luncheon were few and far-between, stretching decades from the early 1980s, when we had our first meet-and-greet exchange at a reception at Freedom House, headquarters of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), held in honour of the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), its youth arm.

There too I also first met many comrades I’d earlier been in constant but invisible ‘Air Mail’ postal correspondence as General Secretary of Saint Lucia’s Workers Revolutionary Movement (WRM), then a young progressive political formation on the island. (I’d already met Dr Cheddi and Mrs Janet Jagan many times at regional and international gatherings.)
There I also first met fellow journalist Moses Nagamootoo, as well as Donald Ramotar, Clement Rohee and others I’d previously met regionally and internationally.

The names I got faces for and pressed flesh with that night also included Brindley Benn and Clinton Collymore, Shirley Edwards and Cyril Belgrave, a young Dr Frank Anthony, June Ward and Gail Teixeira (the latter two back home from Canada) – and my longtime Guyanese friend of Chinese descent, Mirror Photographer George Lee.
George would also introduce me to his other photographer colleague (of similar extract) named Wong and distinguished him from Father Wong (a progressive Catholic priest) and others like Fr Andrew Morrison of the Catholic Standard.

George would tell me fantastic stories about the political persecution of journalists in Guyana, from Rickey Singh and Hubert Williams of the Guiana Graphic to Fr Morrison – and Moses Nagamootoo, who was arrested and charged, persecuted, prosecuted and fined, for writing an article in The Mirror (the Opposition’s newspaper) entitled ‘The President’s Cow’ (about how a poor farmer’s cow was killed by an electrified fence on President Forbes Burnham’s private land…)

George drove me around as a regional journalist covering the 1980 Referendum, in which the symbolic choices selected by the then Burnham-led People’s National Congress (PNC) government were a ‘House’ (for the PNC) and a ‘Mouse’ for the PPP.

I hadn’t known Dr Luncheon well enough back then, but Dr Jagan always spoke highly of him in bilateral meetings with fraternal parties at congresses and in the sidelines of international conferences, commending Roger’s sky-high levels of dedication to positive political change through progressive means, always with ‘the working people’ front and centre of his every intent and decision.

I would eventually meet Roger more frequently after being invited to take up various media-related assignments in Guyana in 1993, but those meetings were ‘en passant’ and mostly by telephone.

As Editor of The Mirror, a director at the state-owned Guyana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC Radio) and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Guyana Television Company (GTV), my interventions with Roger increased over time, but were also indirect.

My multiplicity of duties prevented me from attending any of Dr Luncheon’s weekly post-Cabinet press conferences as Secretary to Cabinet, Secretary of Defence and Head of the Presidential Secretariat (HPS) during the six years I served the party and government, Presidents Cheddi and Janet Jagan and similar friendships with Prime Minister Sam Hinds and his wife Yvonne.

From its revival in 1994, I served as Vice President of the Guyana Relief Council (GRC), with Mrs Hinds as President — a position in which we also often canvassed Dr Luncheon in all his positions, on how to get around bureaucratic red tape technicalities that delayed our capacity to deliver emergency relief across Guyana with the speed necessary to take immediate help to victims, within 24 hours.

Such emergencies were quite frequent back then, caused by fires, floods, landslides and other natural or man-made disasters that left people homeless or displaced, without essential food and health supplies, whether in the interior or coastline, in any of all Guyana’s 10 regions.

June Ward, also working out of the Presidential Secretariat at the time, was another reliable colleague and comrade, through who it was always easier to get separate messages to and responses from Roger — and President Jagan.

Next to Roger in national prominence among Afro Guyanese in the PPP/Civic alliance and administrations was always Prime Minister Hinds, who emerged from Linden’s bauxite industry to accept the offer of being running mate to Dr Jagan in the first free and fair and internationally-monitored presidential and parliamentary, regional and local government elections since 1964.

Likewise, the other very efficient, quiet and loyal Administrative Secretary Nancy Ferreira, who, while Roger served all Presidents of Guyana under all PPP administrations since Democracy returned in 1992, privately told me: “I am humbled to have had the honour to serve my country during the presidency of eight Executive Presidents, over 31 years…”
Nancy would also tell me of Roger: “HPS was a brilliant man. He held positions of power, but was very humble. He could also speak on any topic. What a brother, friend and guide…”
And talking about humility… Roger was louder in private and less selective in choice of adjectives, but I still couldn’t tell – between him and Prime Minister Hinds — which was more-humble: the doctor who rode his bicycle to work, or the successful engineer who rode himself into party politics to better engineer change for all.

George Lee it was too, who’d bring me “up to scratch” on little-known or widely speculated ‘facts and fibs’ about impressions that as then Head of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at PHG when President Burnham was visited with a fateful heart attack, Dr Luncheon “might have made a difference” if allowed to render emergency care to the nation’s President.
During our Sunday outings at Albouystown and other parts of Georgetown where we grounded with brothers and sisters of little average means, George would also offer salacious political tidbits about Roger’s normal treatment with a ten-foot-pole whenever the PNC was in office, but that one senior PNC functionary, “another different kinda doctor” did take Dr Luncheon’s life-saving advice about paying urgent and immediate attention to ex-President Desmond Hoyte’s health condition, after the latter complained about uncomfortable feelings that caused him, as then-Opposition Leader, to miss a scheduled regular meeting with President Jagan.

When I left Guyana to return home in 1999 as Press Secretary to Prime Minister Dr Kenny D. Anthony, Finance Minister Bharrat Jagdeo was just about to succeed President Janet Jagan — as the youngest-ever PPP presidential candidate, who’d delivered impressively as Head of the State Planning Secretariat and in charge of the public purse.
No one was surprised that President Jagdeo kept Dr Luncheon in all his three major posts responsible to Cabinet for both of his two successive terms, or that President Donald Ramotar also did likewise between 2010 and 2015.

When the PPP/Civic lost office in 2015, Roger also lost all his positions held over the previous 23 years — and his health started deteriorating three years later.
After a first illness in 2015 and another in 2018 that eventually hospitalized him in 2019, Roger was forced by his declining physical condition to opt for voluntary retirement from active political and public life.

As life would fate me, I got to hear and listen to and be immeasurably marveled at and by, Roger reciting his life’s history.
It was back in 2019, when everyone had given-up after he was long-hospitalized.

On June 19 that year, he’d been visited by a bishop, blessed with his last rites and given his final Extreme Unction, Roger talked the tale of his life into a tape on what everyone felt was his death-bed, at his home in Stanley Place, Kitty.

In that tale-of-the-tape from The Man Himself, Roger spelt-out his long and colorful life into less than two dozen brief paragraphs, willfully and knowingly reducing his full story from a volume of books to a one-page autobiography.

Clearly, in what he meant to be his Final Word and Last Post, Roger wanted to speak less about himself than his association with ‘The People’s progressive Party’, which he never described by its initials.

Like at his press conferences, then ex-HPS was very selective and thoroughly economical with words, every one remaining within the realm of the respectful person he always was for all of his 74 years on Planet Earth.

Roger made no enemies, but he did have many in Guyana’s divided political arena, who tried their very best to dwindle or downgrade his popularity and effect, but all to no avail.
Through the period between his very-brief June 2019 personal biography-obituary and the last time he actually returned to Public Hospital Georgetown (PHG) — four years later in 2023 — every time Roger came to mind, I simply recited the old 1960’s reggae hit song by Jamaica’s Prince Buster, about a defiant village character who simply refused to die.
Entitled ‘A Hard Man Fe dead’, Prince Buster sang that nameless Jamaican Roger’s story thus:

You pick him up
You lick him down
Him bounce right back
What a hard man fe dead!
Dem say de cat have a nine-life
But dis man have ninety-nine life…
Dem boil one pot of chocolate tea
And all the fry-fish dey caught in the sea…
Dey also got six quarts of rum
Saying they waiting for the ‘nine-night’ to come…
The last time I heard dem say
That dis man was dead…
Dem buy one block of ice
And lay it down ‘pon his head…
Now de procession leadin’ to de cemetery
De man holler-out ‘Don’t you bury me!’
Dem drop de box and run
What a whole lotta fun,
What a hard man fe dead!